Growing up, if we were visiting my grandparents when the weather was bad the first thing I'd grab was a stereoscope and its cards that one of my great-grandparents had as a child. The images always seemed like mini-movies to me, since the 3d effect is so clear and so unexpected (hey, I was a kid, I had no idea how this sort of magic was done).

A quick search online led me this page, where I found several of the cards I've got, some from this set, one from the Civil War era (unfortunately I haven't pulled the cards out lately, so I'm sure there's a lot that I'm missing because I can't remember the captions well enough to search for them). When my grandmother packed up her house to move, the set of cards and the viewer were the one thing I that I insisted on taking, since she was going to toss it out.posted by chickygrrl at 1:08 PM on January 10, 2005

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